Wikipedia talk:Naming conventions (ancient Romans)

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[edit] Interesting proposal

But! It assumes that every single one of them deserves a wiki-article. Do you want to create an article just for saying so and so was pretor in 244 BC? I'd rather have something in the style of Caecilius Metellus, creating separate articles only for people w´hich further distinguished themselves. In other words I suggest: keeping all the stubs together in the paged named after the name they share. MvHG 11:26, 18 May 2004 (UTC)

I've gone back and forth on that several times in my WP career. Right now I'm tending to favor splitting, because when you put several people in one article, links from events centuries apart end up on the same page, and we make the poor reader manually sort through the dozen people trying to figure which one was actually meant, and editors not familiar with the subject would likely "fix" the descriptions incorrectly if they picked the wrong person. Of course, if a person is not ever going to be linked to from anywhere else, then there's no reason not to leave on a group page. Stan 15:51, 18 May 2004 (UTC)

[edit] A proposal regarding articles on Romans

I might suggest that when an Anglicized form is often used (e.g. Livy or Marc/Mark Antony), the original form be the article and the Anglicized form the redirect. If all wikipedias would adopt this it'd make interwiki linking a lot easier -- Antony would be listed under Marcus Antonius everywhere, as he already is on DA, DE, NL, and SV. In fact, the article on en.wikipedia discussing Marcus Antonius refers to him as "Antonius" everywhere except the title, and such a standard would appear to be already in place on the German wikipedia, though it may just be that Germans retain the proper endings on their Romans. We need not be constrained in fact to the constraints of a paper encyclopedia; if people come looking for Mark Antony, they can be directed to Marcus Antonius, unless we wish to start referring to Cicero as Tully; a uniform appearance is a desirable characteristic, even if it makes people undergo a redirect here and there. --Jeff Anonymous 07:40, 23 Nov 2004 (UTC)

FWIW, I agree wholeheartedly. — B.Bryant 11:26, 13 Apr 2005 (UTC)

FWIW, I don't. This is just pedantagonism. --Jpbrenna 06:58, 1 Jun 2005 (UTC)

I also agree. Using the word pedantagonism is pedantagonism. Using true names is simply accuracy, so long as a redirect or acknowledgment exists. — Jowfair 6 August 2005

I used to favor Marcus Antonius until I came into contact with a language which has cases. That language (Serbo-Croat FWIW) takes the root of the name rather than nominative. This brought home to me that using a form like Antony based on the root is just as "correct" as using the nominative form especially as in English it will be used even when the object.Dejvid 09:30, 1 September 2005 (UTC)